KEPT IN TRANSLATION
U.S. remake offers up a taut thriller about an emergency in progress
I'm of two minds on The Guilty. On the one hand, it's a U.S. remake of a great foreign film, a practice to which I am fundamentally opposed. On the other, it manages not to destroy anything that made the original such a fine viewing pleasure, which is the basis of my opposition. And so in this case I shall stay any charges I might have brought against it.
The 2018 original, Den skyldige, was a Danish thriller from first-time filmmaker Gustav Möller, who said in an interview shortly after its release: “I've been asked about remaking it myself in another language — you can guess which one — but I'm not interested in doing that. Making a film has to be like an unanswered question. You have this challenge ahead of you that you are trying to resolve.
“When the film is done, the question is dead and the challenge is over.”
Good answer. But U.S. director Antoine Fuqua had never stepped up to this particular challenge, and he has a history of alternating between original stories (Training Day, Shooter, Olympus Has Fallen) and reboots (The Magnificent Seven, The Equalizer).
Nestled between the recent VOD release of the sci-fi thriller Infinite and the upcoming slave drama Emancipation, The Guilty would seem to be his remake of the moment.
Despite its pre-pandemic provenance, the film seems perfect to have been made in these times. Set entirely in a pair of windowless offices, it stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Joe Baylor, a California police officer pulling a night shift as an operator/dispatcher in a 911 call centre.
Cynical and weary, he almost hangs up on one caller who seems to be talking to her child through the phone, only to suddenly realize that perhaps she isn't free to state the nature of her emergency. A few deft yes-orno questions tell him she's been abducted and is on the highway. Joe immediately starts trying to figure out how to locate her and rescue her, not to mention how to check in on the child, who seems to have been left alone at home.
Telling the story more or less in real time, and with a taut screenplay from Nic Pizzolatto, who also worked on The Magnificent Seven, Fuqua keeps the tension high as Joe juggles phone calls and computer searches, even while fending off a nosy L.A. Times reporter who wants to talk to him about something. Details on this are kept scant until the end, but it's clear he's not getting a cop-of-the-year citation.
Fuqua adds some period details — wildfires raging out of control, for instance — and throws a bunch of celebrities into the mix as callers: See if you can identify Peter Sarsgaard, Ethan Hawke, Da'vine Joy Randolph, Paul Dano or Bill Burr from voice alone.
But at its heart this is a simple, spine-tingling tale of a man working with limited resources and a finite time frame to solve a mystery. It works in any language, and if you haven't seen the Danish original, this one will do nicely.